As you know, the White House is asking for input on public participation best practices and metrics, including for e-participation.

I’m informally pulling together a few fellow IAP2 USA members to discuss how we might want to answer the technology part. We might take this opportunity to kick off our community of practice around online engagement (originally planned for Q2/2012).

We’d like to open it up to others who are interested in the topic, not just IAP2 USA members. Ping me if you’re interested, and I’ll share dial-in information:

Friday, December 16, 2011
at 9am Pacific (60 minutes)
Online note pad

This will be a casual conversation. We’ll do a quick round of comments followed by discussion. Any output will be OK to share and could inform whatever formal or informal responses are being worked on, by individuals or organizations.

It’s been a little over two months since we last took a look at We The People adoption metrics. Lucas Cioffi, NCDD Board member, on Thursday attended a meeting on the Open Government Partnership (OGP), specifically the U.S. Action Plan. He was able to score the following metrics: White House Meeting on OpenGov Action Plan

Of all the stats mentioned in the meeting, I think that the most relevant ones were about the Administration’s We The People petition website which has now received 1.5 million signatures on nearly 20,000 petitions. 82 petitions have crossed the minimum threshold of 25,000 signatures, at which point the Administration has committed to issuing a formal response. 32 petitions have received a formal response already in the last 2.5 months and they are aiming to respond to roughly one per day in the months going forward.

Yesterday, the White House shared their latest update (though the growth chart shown at the top somehow does not include November data): We the People Update

We the People is averaging nearly 20,000 new users and 31,000 new signatures every day. Our most active day for new users and signatures was the day of our launch, but we certainly haven’t slowed down: more petitions were created on October 26 than any other day since We the People has been active. [...]

They had around 800,000 registered users at the end of October, maybe around 900,000 by now.

At less than three months into the project, these numbers are quite impressive, making We The People the most successful Open Government initiative in the participation column to date.

As promised, I’ve been tracking the numbers from the ongoing Open Government discussions on a daily basis (follow the thread on GovLoop for details). We’re now almost three weeks into this initiative. Here’s a chart that shows how the numbers have developed since February 9 (a few days after launch):

Ideas: 993
Comments: 2,314
Votes: 13,747
Users: 3,898

Growth is pretty linear, nothing too surprising happening (yet).  At the very least, it seems that some agencies are slowly making progress with their outreach efforts.

The total numbers include active and inactive agencies alike. For comparison, here’s the same chart for NASA, the agency with the most overall activity (by our measurements):

Ideas: 122
Comments: 428
Votes: 2,453
Users: 340

It’s a bit hard to see but the last two days have seen a significant increase in registered users and votes.

There are more than three weeks left. Plenty of time to double or triple these figures.

A few days ago, a new site was launched that helps track activity across the 23 federal agencies that are using IdeaScale for their consultations on Open Government: OpenGov Tracker

This webpage makes use of the IdeaScale API to aggregate data for all agencies which are making use of that platform. USDA and Health and Human Services also have public feedback sites; however they are not using IdeaScale and so unfortunately, are not included here. We encourage you to visit their sites, too!

Totals reflect all ideas including those submitted to the “Site Feedback” category. The “Top Ideas Across Government” section only highlights ideas in the categories of Transparency, Participation, Collaboration, and Innovation– eg., those related to the Open Government Plans themselves.

The site was created by Robbie Schingler and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, who both work at NASA.

This is a most excellent example of how participation tools can expose some of the quantitative information about an ongoing consultation (IdeaScale itself does some of the basics, though does not offer a convenient view across all 23 projects).

It’s especially nice to see how metrics are being made actionable. The section “Needs Some Love” lists those agencies that haven’t received a lot of input yet along with the call to action: “They need some love. Please help!”

This metrics dashboard is a nice addition to my tracking thread on GovLoop where we also try to keep an eye on qualitative data.

There is of course a lot more that the perfect dashboard could include but this is definitely a refreshing step forward.

Please leave a comment below if you know of any tools that offer this kind of eye candy out of the box.